


Bows only to what is to come

by cuneifire



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Historical Hetalia, Pre-Bronze Age collapse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 03:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14393196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuneifire/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: “The girl is no empire, Egypt thinks. She is an empire to be.”Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, cats and things to come.





	Bows only to what is to come

**Author's Note:**

> There is no tag for Ancient Greece & Ancient Egypt. This offends me greatly. Anyways, here's some stuff on the ancients for no particular reason other than I really enjoy mood whiplash, I suppose.  
> I'm sorry if my head canons are off with history/canon (does Mycenae-> Ancient Greece? I treated them as sort of similar but still separate things. Idk.)

Egypt stares, kohl lined eyes widening, at the girl.

She’s small, very small, so small. Egypt can’t remember a time when she was that small. Her shoulders are draped in a plain white toga that Egypt always thought symbolized something like peasantry to the Mycenaean people, but the girl does not give off an aura of peasantry.

                No, when the girl picks up her dark furred cat and tries to pet it, Egypt does not sense peasantry. She leans closer from behind the wall, both to make sure her cat is not harmed, and to investigate this girl further.

Stepping out from the corner of her building, she turns the corner towards the girl, whose attentions do not drift from the cat, who sniffs her hand cautiously, as he did the first time her sniffed Egypt’s outstretched limbs, when she first came to be.

She looks at the girl, whose eyes raise just to meet her gaze.

                Finally, she speaks to the girl. When she receives nothing but a brief glance of confusion, she tries again. Her Greek is not a height of finesse, but she has spent time with merchants at the sea ports, picking up words and syllables of the foreign tongue.

She tries again, words coming out broken and strewn improperly, she knows, but she wants to hear this small girl, with dirty fingers and a clever glance. She feels it will be very important in the future.

“Who you are?” She asks, tilting her head to the side as the girl raises her gaze to meet Egypt’s, hand on the stiltedly purring cat, content to lie in the sun under the hand of any master.

The girl, it appears, does not speak, because although the light of comprehension comes to her eyes and her lips move slightly, she does not talk.

Egypt looks downwards, shoulder moving a slight touch downwards. Perhaps she was incorrect, and this girl is nothing more than a mute peasant.

                But she looks at the cat, happy to sit next to the girl, even though it had hissed and scratched Egypt when she first met it, and avoided strangers like they brought illnesses abound with them.

Taking a step forwards, she closed her eyes and for a second, listened. Felt. She’d felt this before, near the man who she’d come to know as the Sumer, near the river the first time she’d seen him, watching her with crossed arms from across the water, and after him the Akkadian Empire, who shared some of his features but not all of them, like Mycenae, who watched her with careful eyes and a hand to her sheathed sword at trade ports.

This girl was no peasant. She was like Egypt, like Mycenae, like those who had come before.

She was an empire.

No, Egypt thought as she stepped forwards, into the glaring light, that was not right. Empires were not mute, empires gave off a stronger aura than this girl, petting the cat with no concern. Empires held the weight of the world on their shoulders- Egypt knew that all too well.

This girl was not an empire, no.

Egypt knelt down, pressing her hand to the top of the cat’s head and smoothly petting him, the girl removing her pale hand and staring up at Egypt, legs bend and splayed under her, curious.

No, this girl is no empire. She is an empire to be, Egypt thinks as the cat begins to purr.

After looking at her for a few more brief passages of time, the look in the girl’s eyes changes. It goes from curious to knowing, in the passage of a half shadow.

“ _ἐγώ θέλημα ὄψομαι σύ ἄνωθεν_ ” She says, slowly and broken, stumbling over the words as if she has never spoken before.

“I will see you again.” She repeats, glint in her eyes, heels hitting again the stone of the building as she back off and turns away.

Egypt contemplates what she knows of Greek, and then decides what the girl said is probable.

Although something tells her it will not be for a very long time, and something in her heart she does not know twists at it.

The next time they meet, she is sure things will be very different.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes  
> -Story takes place sometime before the Bronze Age collapse (1200-1150 BC), after the establishment of Mycenae (around 1600 BC), probably towards the later end of it.  
> -During the classical era, Ancient Greece seized control of Ancient Egypt (in Alexander the Great’s conquests, 332 BC), which is why Egypt has such an odd feeling about Greece.  
> Thanks for reading!


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